Conduit 3 might be happening

For games whose sales underperform, it doesn't mean that there won't ever be a sequel.

There are additional factors involved in determining whether something which has exhibited poor market performance will get a sequel. The big question is why did it perform poorly.

In C2's case, most of the copies which were made were sold. For those of you that haven't shopped for a second copy, it's pretty much impossible to find one now except for the secondary market. Yes, Games covered this with the counter that Sega only produced a few copies because they thought that only a few copies would sell. Whatever their reasoning for limiting production, any prediction of the games actual selling potential had they produced more copies would be purely speculation at this point.

Depending on your side of the argument, the game got fair to decent reviews, from both reviewers and actual consumers that played the game. Please don't quote gaming internet publications here, just go look a Amazon's reviews. These are reviews from people who paid for and actually played the game and have absolutely nothing to gain from giving the game a good or bad review.

We've also already covered the complete lack of hype and advertising already, so all this is old news, like most of the rest of this thread.

I want to go somewhere new now, and that's how the perception of HVS and the Conduit franchise in general may affect future sales. There seems to be a small number of very vocal hardcore gamers that constantly abuse and bash both HVS and the Conduit franchise. What does this mean for the future? Absolutely nothing.

What? Huh?

Yes. It means nothing, especially the opinions of a handful of gfaqers about whether something is good or not or whether it will be successful or not.

Pull up a chair and get comfortable.

A little over a year ago, a pretty big event happened in the comics industry. DC relaunched all of its titles under the banner "The New 52." Some got reboots, retcons, whatever it's called.

Amongst all the retcons and reboots, something was announced that put "the fan community" up in arms and they immediately attacked it as a horrible idea. Barbara Gordon was set to return as Batgirl. For those of you who don't know, Barbara Gordon (daughter of commissioner Gordon) was the original Batgirl, going all the way back to the 1960’s and the creation of the character for the Batman TV show. However, in the 80's Barbara was shot in the spine by the Joker and left paralyzed, confined to a wheelchair. Adding insult to injury, she was shot while being a civilian, not even as Batgirl.

At the time, the Editor in Chief of DC had a dislike for Batgirl stories and wanted to be done with them and the character forever. With the exception of a few stories told in flashback, she's been leading the Birds of Prey from a wheelchair ever since, as the character Oracle who is sort of a computer expert.

Meanwhile, there have been two other characters to take up the Batgirl mantle since then. The most recent one was a modestly successful title that was still runing as The New 52 was about to launch in September 2011, and had to be cancelled to make room for Barbara.

Almost everyone thought it was a terrible idea for Barbara to return to Batgirl. Fans of the other Batgirl felt cheated, and thought that restoring Barbara’s ability to walk diminished her otherwise strong character as Oracle, while also eliminating a differently abeled superherione role model. Just search the Gfaqs comic and graphic novels forum for Batgirl and you will quickly be able to confirm how strongly the most of the experts in the community were against Barbara returning as Batgirl.

Guess what happened?---Conduit2FC(36): 3354-2948-5226

#2_Signal(Topic Creator)Posted 3/7/2013 8:28:46 PM

Barbara Gordon returned as Batgirl.

And, more importantly, Batgirl has been holding steadily at the #17 position since Barbara returned. Within DC it’s the #6 selling comic, outselling Superman, Wonder Woman, Batwoman, and Catwoman. It also outsells Marvel's Captain America, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, and Thor. The other Batgirl didn’t even break into the top 50 a single time in the preceding 12 months.

My point is, it really doesn't matter what the opinion of one, or a few, very vocal detractors have to say about whether or not something will be successful based on how it's perceived by the "fan community." The vocal fan community represents a vast minority of consumers. It's impossible to predict. If IT could be predicted, every company would be producing IT.

Yeah, yeah, I know this is not the comic book industry. Games said the same thing when I compared the video game industry to the movie industry.---Conduit2FC(36): 3354-2948-5226

#3games1256Posted 3/7/2013 8:34:12 PM(edited)

No we won't get Conduit 3 read this.

“That’s a misnomer in our industry. By and large people look at it and they say, if it’s not a million unit seller it’s a flop. That’s preposterous. If I make this bottle of Coke, and let’s say there’s 10 pence of materials here – coloured water, sugar and a glass bottle – if I sell this for a pound, I’ve just made money. Whatever the product is, if it costs you less to make than you end up making off the thing, you make profit. As long as the profit margin is strong enough, then you get enough of a return and you can make another. The biggest misconception of consumers of the industry is that million-unit benchmark. When you really look at the number of games a year that sell over a million units, it’s almost none of them. If that really were the minimum bar for a success, the game industry would be gone in under a year. There are thousands of games released that don’t sell a million units. There are like 10 games a year that sell over a million units. But if you can sell a few hundred thousand copies – 300, 400 thousand copies, which is in the range that we did – we made money off that. We did well. Although it was a considerable budget for a Wii title, it was not the kind of budget a Gears of War had. If we’d spent the Gears of War money, then we probably wouldn’t be having this discussion now. We’d be back working on something else. We’d always like to make money. Everyone would. But if we sold the exact same number of units as we sold with Conduit 1, we’d be high-fiving each other. But I think we’ll do better.” – High Voltage’s Eric Nofsinger

He is saying if Conduit 2 sold as well as The conduit they would keep making Conduit. Since it did not they have to work on other games.

This is the sales numbers Conduit 2 is at.

http://www.vgchartz.com/game/44135/conduit-2/Global/Yes vg chartz may not be the best source but it is the best we have.Sales number of The Conduit http://www.vgchartz.com/game/19541/the-conduit/

#4_Signal(Topic Creator)Posted 3/7/2013 8:34:27 PM

Did you even read my post during the two minutes?---Conduit2FC(36): 3354-2948-5226

#5games1256Posted 3/7/2013 8:44:50 PM(edited)

_Signal posted...

Did you even read my post during the two minutes?

Yes and I understood what you said. For what I think it is sales that matter for video games based on the past game if a future game is going to happen and the chance of a future game to profit. It all comes down to money.

#6_Signal(Topic Creator)Posted 3/7/2013 8:44:29 PM

games1256 posted...

_Signal posted...

Did you even read my post during the two minutes?

Yes and I understood what you said. For what I think it is sales that matter for video games and the chance of a future game to profit. It all comes down to money.

So then you're finally going to drop all the "HVS has a bad reputation business?"---Conduit2FC(36): 3354-2948-5226

#7games1256Posted 3/7/2013 8:48:04 PM(edited)

_Signal posted...

games1256 posted...

_Signal posted...

Did you even read my post during the two minutes?

Yes and I understood what you said. For what I think it is sales that matter for video games and the chance of a future game to profit. It all comes down to money.

So then you're finally going to drop all the "HVS has a bad reputation business?"

No rep still matters. No one is going to buy a sequel to a game they hated. When it comes down to a dev team like HVS choosing to make a future game they base it on past sales.

#8_Signal(Topic Creator)Posted 3/7/2013 8:58:20 PM

games1256 posted...

_Signal posted...

games1256 posted...

_Signal posted...

Did you even read my post during the two minutes?

Yes and I understood what you said. For what I think it is sales that matter for video games and the chance of a future game to profit. It all comes down to money.

So then you're finally going to drop all the "HVS has a bad reputation business?"

No rep still matters. No one is going to buy a sequel to a game they hated. When it comes down to a dev team like HVS choosing to make a future game they base it on past sales.

Then in that case, it's a good thing C2 didn't sell too many copies. Not that many people can hate the game. The market is wide open.

The blog that you quoted is over two years old. I'd say it's out of date. If you really want to back up your argument you need to find something that was said after Sega's decision to limit production and C2's release.

I'm done for now. Nice chatting with you.

And I think you totally ignored my post in your other thread... the one about what we would like to see in C3. I posted a well thought out reply.

And by the way, it's a little frustrating to compose a well thought out response only to have you fire off one of your stock one-liners. You would be way more fun to chat with if you spent half the time putting your reply together that I spent writing mine. Just a bit of forum etiquette.---Conduit2FC(36): 3354-2948-5226

#9games1256Posted 3/7/2013 9:28:27 PM(edited)

_Signal posted...

games1256 posted...

_Signal posted...

games1256 posted...

_Signal posted...

Did you even read my post during the two minutes?

Yes and I understood what you said. For what I think it is sales that matter for video games and the chance of a future game to profit. It all comes down to money.

So then you're finally going to drop all the "HVS has a bad reputation business?"

No rep still matters. No one is going to buy a sequel to a game they hated. When it comes down to a dev team like HVS choosing to make a future game they base it on past sales.

Then in that case, it's a good thing C2 didn't sell too many copies. Not that many people can hate the game. The market is wide open.

The blog that you quoted is over two years old. I'd say it's out of date. If you really want to back up your argument you need to find something that was said after Sega's decision to limit production and C2's release.

I'm done for now. Nice chatting with you.

And I think you totally ignored my post in your other thread... the one about what we would like to see in C3. I posted a well thought out reply.

And by the way, it's a little frustrating to compose a well thought out response only to have you fire off one of your stock one-liners. You would be way more fun to chat with if you spent half the time putting your reply together that I spent writing mine. Just a bit of forum etiquette.

The blog post is fine it stated what number of copies sold they have to be at to profit in terms of cost to make the game. Plus rep in video games matter and HVS has a bad rep. Amazon still has new copies of Conduit 2. So for you saying we don't know if Conduit 2 would sell more if more copies were made is untrue. So if Sega made more copies they would just end up unsold.

#101PefrogPosted 3/7/2013 9:10:38 PM

Not to change the subject but ... Signal, your gfaqs name used to be Signalbatgirl. You know a lot about batgirl. Something is going on there.---Jesus could have baked the most delicious cake.